Does our analysis suggest cultural evolution represents an autonomous system? In other words, once cultural
transmission is in place, does cultural evolution generally operate in an ancillary role, handmaiden of genetic
adaptation, or does it break free of the influence of genetic evolution completely?

Their answer is:

although cultural fitness is a distinct quantity, if it is not aligned with genetic fitness, then there is genetic selection to change the learning rules that underpin cultural transmission, making minds more discriminating. For these reasons, cultural evolution cannot become completely autonomous. In this, we echo Lumsden & Wilson’s (1981) famous conclusion that ‘genetic natural selection operates in such a way as to keep culture on a leash’ (p. 13)

I'm sorry - but this argument is a joke. It is not logically coherent. A. G. Cairns-Smith pointed out long ago that genetic takeovers were possible - describing the mechanism by which they could happen. The following diagram illustrates the process.

Just because there's selection acting on DNA that acts against it being phased out, that doesn't mean that we are stuck with DNA forever. I'm sure that there was selection on Dodos being phased out - but nonetheless, we don't have any Dodos any more. Just because selection at one level favours some outcome, it doesn't follow that that outcome will happen.

Broadly the same argument that these authors give about cultural symbionts "proves" that parasites will never wipe out their host species. However there are known cases of parasites driving their hosts to extinction. For example, according to a reference given at the end of this article, there is very good evidence that avian malaria and birdpox were responsible for the extinction of a substantial proportion of the Hawaiian avifauna in the late nineteenth century. Parasites can cause population instability that leads to increased risk of stochastic extinction. Or they can just decimate their host populations through gradual attenuation. Extinction of host populations becomes more likely when the parasites have multiple host species - and are not dependent on any one of them. So, when memes are no longer completely dependent on humans for their reproduction - and are capable of reproducing independently via networked machines, that's when the humans should start to watch out.

You can't plan to avoid particular outcomes if you have a theoretical precommitment to the idea that those outcomes are impossible. The idea that Wilson's leash is necessarily a permanent restraint is not just a silly mistake, it is a dangerous delusion - which it is important that not too many people buy into.

The analysis by these authors is so bad, its embarrassing. Cultural evolution really can help us to understand and navigate the future evolution of the human species. Just because some people have managed to mis-apply the theory and come to silly conclusions, that should not be taken as a reflection on the whole theory.

Monday, 29 September 2014

Cultural kin selection has faced some criticism. I'll try and track some of the most common objections on this page:

Humans are too good at tracking relationships

In 2008, Boyd and Richerson expressed frank incredulity at the idea that humans are being fooled into thinking that non-relative are relatives - and so behaving nicely towards them. They wrote:

Living primates are very good at discriminating between relatives and non-relatives and behave very differently toward each. It is hard to see why early hominids should have been less discriminating in their behavior.

I don't think this is a particularly challenging puzzle. Most primates don't live with rapidly-evolving cultural symbionts who need to manipulate them into coming into peaceful contact with other members of their own species in order to allow the symbionts to reproduce.

Additionally, memes don't just regard other humans as potential homes of their own future offspring. Other humans are often existing containers for their own offspring, parents and siblings. Memes use the kin-detection mechanisms in human hosts to preserve copies of themselves in other bodies via host manipulation.

It is these cultural symbionts - which humans have and most other animals don't - that means that the human kin-recognition mechanisms are so frequently the target of successful manipulative attacks. Essentially: the cultural symbionts have short generation times, evolve rapidly and actively seek out the holes in the host kin-recognition psychology.

Anthropologists have long recognized that kin categories are indeed influenced by culture. For example, they have distinguished between "biological kinship" and "social kinship" (Hawkes, 1983) and between "natural kin" and "nurtural kin" (Watson, 1983). That kinship relationships can be significantly influenced by culture is really a commonplace fact these days.

Also, other species are not completely immune from this sort of kinship-based manipulation. For example, cuckoo hosts are regularly fooled into thinking that cuckoo chicks are their kin - and into providing resources for them. Notice that active manipulation by a symbiont is also involved in this case. In the case of cuckoos, succeess comes to them not because their genes evolve rapidly compared to their host - but because they are relatively rare - and so are not worth defending better against.

Lastly, I think that there's a bit of a straw man in the framing of this objection. In cultural kin selection, people are not normally literally fooled into thinking that non-relative are really relatives. Instead they are fed sensory sitmulii that act as a superstimulus to kin detection routines in their unconscious minds. If you ask brother Mark whether brother John is a blood relative, he will probably give the correct answer. However this doesn't mean that their shared memes and shared monastic robes aren't relevant to the extent of their cooperation. Manipulation can take place unconsciously. Also: relatedness isn't a binary quantity; there are degrees of relatedness. Memes can and do massively increase levels of perceived relatedness between their human hosts - and it makes sense that they do this partly to increase their own inclusive fitness.

Relatedness is hard to estimate in cultural evolution

In the case of culture, the analog of kinship is very hard to estimate. Having two parents with equal genetic contribution makes the calculation of relatedness easy. In cultural transmission, one, two, a few, or many people in your social network are possible sources of culture. People may use different parts of their network for different cultural domains. No one has proposed a way to estimate cultural relatedness in the face of such problems.

I have previously worked through this objection in my article on cultural kin selection - in the section titled "memetic relatedness". To recap: it is not true that no one has proposed a way to measure cultural relatedness. Also, relatedness between two humans is one problem, and relatedness between two artifacts or two messages are different problems. The latter problems are significantly more tractable. Cultural information spends some of its time inside brains and some of its time moving between brains - and during these "external transmission" phases, it is often much easier to quantify it.

It is often harder to measure relatedness in cultural evolution - due to the lack of meiosis. However, this is not a show-stopping problem. Not all creatures in the organic realm feature meiosis in the first place - yet they still have relatives and must allocate resources between themselves and their offspring and parents. The theories associated with kin selection still apply in these cases.

Cultural relatedness is often easy to calculate. For example, Alice's dollar bill is related by around 100% to Bob's dollar bill, and around 0% to Charlie's Japanese yen. Also, having some relatednesses that are difficult to quantify is not a problem unique to cultural evolution. For example, in organic evolution, it isn't easy to measure the relatedness to two Portugese man o 'war individuals. The fact that they are a symbiotic conglomerate is a complication - but not a show stopping problem.

Maximization of inclusive fitness may not apply "commonly"

How deep is the analogy between biological and cultural
evolution? Memetics assumes that it is deep indeed; that
the main relevant details of the biological case have direct
equivalents in the cultural case, such that there is, for
example, a cultural phenotype, which achieves a certain
level of (inclusive) fitness, which will in turn determine the
phenotype’s relative success in the population.

This is good so far, though I would identify this as a conclusion from many decades of
observations - rather than an "assumption". The authors go on to say:

Darwinian selection leads to the maximization of inclusive
fitness, and this explains the appearance of design in the natural
world. Is there an analogous result for cultural attraction?
As selection is a special case of attraction, design is possible
and in some cases explicable in standard Darwinian terms.
Having said that, such explanations will not apply generally,
and may not even apply commonly.

The concept of "inclusive fitness" is a simplified model of kin selection which no-one believes applies generally. However, kin selection is a very generally-applicable idea - it is a consequence of natural selection itself in structured populations.

As for the generality of Darwinism itself - it all depends on what you mean by the term. I think most accept that evolutionary theory has moved on a bit since Darwin's era - with the incorporation of symbiosis, game theory and an understanding of self-organizing systems. However, many still use the term "Darwinism" for the resulting evolutionary theory - as a way of giving Darwin credit for coming up with the basic idea in the first place. Ultimately, this is a terminological issue.

Personally, I don't like Sperber's various terminology proposals. In fact, I think that they suck. "Attraction" is a basic concept in dynamical systems theory. If you want to redefine it, you had better have a good case. Sperber doesn't present such a case; he doesn't have one. Overloading the term with multiple similar meanings is not an attractive option.

The debate is not about selfishness versus generosity or individualism versus groupishness. The debate is about whether generosity, cooperation, altruism, etc. are instantiated by a psychology designed by individual or group selection. If the former, then this psychology should have design features that, on average and under conditions that match ancestral conditions, eventually lead to net benefits for the individuals or their kin.

However, this is a bad framing of the problem. Modern versions of kin selection and group selection are equivalent - and make the same predictions. If you argue against group selection on the grounds that kin selection is responsible, you haven't understood this - and so can't really usefully contribute to the discussion.

Another example is Steven Pinker. He criticizes group selection, cultural group selection and cultural evolution in The False Allure of Group Selection. Pinker's arguments vary from being reasonable to being wrong. Overall, he has no coherent case against group selection, cultural group selection and cultural evolution - assuming the group selection variants are interpreted as being equivalent to the corresponding kin selection theories.

Pinker's article is remarkable in including a lot of commentary - which illustrates how much confusion surrounds these topics on all sides.

It all boils down to genes

Wilson-style sociobiology - and most evolutionary psychology - has long held the opinion that in biology, it
all boils down to DNA genes. That DNA genes are the only medium of inheritance in evolution that matters.
Memes are ignored - and all advantage is ascribed and attributed to DNA genes. From the perspective of
memetics, this position seems ridiculous - but it seems to be a remarkably mainstream position.

In the context of cultural kin selection, uniforms become a way for humans to manipulate other humans.
Holy fathers and mother superiors become ways for church leaders to manipulate their flock. Rather than
memes manipulating humans for their own benefit, humans are seen as using memes to manipulate other humans -
for the benefit of their own DNA genes.

There's obviously some truth to this perspective. Human genes do often benefit from the manipulations described
by cultural kin selection. Military leaders do benefit if their army behaves as though it is a big family.

The problem arises when advantage to memes is completely neglected. This tends to result in an impoverished perspective on the evolutionary process, which loses much of its explanatory power. Those who think that only genes matter are missing half of the picture.

Recent criticisms of kin selection itself deserve a mention here.
Group selection advocates have long been critical of kin selection -
arguing that kinship is only one of many ways in which organisms
can come to share features, that group selection is more general,
that inclusive fitness is a awkward, artificial concept, that kin
selection is too hard to apply - and so on.

In some cases widespread criticism from the scientific community
pointing out that some of the more extreme critics are plainly off
their rockers has helped with some of this.

Widespread recognition that kin selection and group selection are broadly
equivalent concepts and represent different perspectives on the same kind
of phenomena should help to damp down some more of these criticisms.

However, kin selection has had its flaws. The widespread failure to apply kin selection to cultural phenomena is one of these. This failure is explicitly
mentioned by some critics - e.g. here.
However, that is not so much a problem with kin selection, as it is a problem
with the scientific failure to get to grips with cultural evolution.
Anthropologists - whose job largely involves studying human culture -
are mostly-living in a pre-Darwinism timewarp - in which evolutionary
theory is not applied to their subject matter. The way to deal with
this is not to use kin selection less, but to use cultural kin selection
more.

While kin selection is not without issues, these seem minor
into comparison with the problems with group selection. Group selection
seems to be a fountain of junk science. I think it should come with
clear health warnings - and, generally speaking, it does do so.

Anyway, this probably isn't the best place to review the whole kin selection vs group selection debate.
I do have another blog where
that is one of the main topics.

Kin selection has been a tremendously useful and productive tool in the biological sciences,
and there is absolutely no reason why it can't be similarly useful and productive
in cultural evolution - and in the social sciences generally. At this stage, scientists just
need to pull their fingers out and start applying it. Hopefully, my reviews of the topic have
indicated the abundance of low-hanging fruit in this area.

Sunday, 28 September 2014

This is a big and important topic which must be condensed for this kind of format - so this is a "firehose" presentation on the topic.

Nepotism is a common phenomena in nature. It has long been understood that evolutionary theory could help to explain why organisms help their relatives. However it wasn't until the 1960s that the process responsible for nepotism was formally modelled.

William Hamilton visualized the germ line of organisms as being broken up into many genes. Each gene is surrounded by many copies of itself in its relatives. It then becomes possible to ask what behaviour the gene could promote that would help the swarm of genes to propagate itself. The answer indicates that there are circumstances under which genes can favour transferring resources to other existing copies of themselves at the expense of their own direct descendants.

The theory that quantifies and explains this phenomenon is known to biologists as "kin selection".

It is a commonplace observation that cultural similarity also results in cooperative behaviour. Empirically, there's a correlation between the memes that people share and how likely they are to cooperate with one another. Memes resulting in observable markers seem particularly significant - so the uniforms worn by the military, nurses, religious orders and corporate workers are especially closely associated with cooperative behaviour. The most conventional explanation for this is known as "fictive kinship". The idea is that shared uniforms stimulate mechanisms evolved to deal with kinship at the level of DNA genes. The kinship involved is not real blood kinship, but rather has been faked by leaders of these groups for their own ends - thus the term "fictive kinship".

However, another explanation invokes cultural kinship. The theory of kin selection is not confined to DNA genes. It can equally be applied to memes. Shared memes often result in cooperation in the same way that shared genes do. Like DNA fragments, memes are frequently surrounded by a swarm of copies of themselves. Again, it is possible to ask what behaviour promoted by the meme would serve to promote the propagation of the swarm of copies surrounding it. Again the answer indicates that memes will sometimes sacrifice themselves to promote the propagation of other copies of themselves. The theory that explains this is called "cultural kin selection" - and that is what this video is about.

Cultural kinship helps to explain why nurses wear similar uniforms to each other and cooperate with one another. Shared memes help to explain explains why your computer and your printer peacefully cooperate to print documents. Nuns form cultural "sisterhoods" and monks form cultural "brotherhoods". Their lives are often dominated by the memes they share, and their mission in life is typically to spread these memes to others. Patriotism memes illustrate that memes can sacrifice themselves if it helps copies of the same meme in others to survive. Cultural kinship is an essential tool for understanding how memes propagate the modern world.

In the organic realm close kinship sometimes results in eusociality - where a fertile queen is surrounded by multiple sterile workers. We see the same phenomenon in culture - banks are surrounded by millions of identical coins and bills. These are not themselves copied. Indeed there are cultural adaptations which actively prevent counterfeit copies from being made. The function of these multiple identical cultural entities is to divert resources to their cultural parents in the bank. Another familiar case involves digital books. these exist in multiple identical copies. However most of the copies themselves are not fertile. Digital rights management and legal threats are used to try and prevent them from being copied.

Sterile worker forms are one of the tell-tale signatures of kin selection. The other one is self-sacrifice. Memes that spread despite apparently aiding their personal destruction could be being spread via cultural kin selection. Patriotism memes and suicide bomber memes are possible examples.

Kin selection is famously associated with Hamilton's rule. To briefly recap, Hamilton's rule measures the cost to a donor and the benefit of a recipient associated with a behaviour and the relatedness between the actors. It then asserts that the behaviour can be favoured by kin selection if the benefit is greater than the cost multiplied by the relatedness. This simplified model of kin selection has proved to be quite useful in the organic domain. However its utility depends partly on the ease of measuring relatedness. In the organic realm, there's a simple approximation that can be used: parents are related to offspring by one half, cousins by one eighth - and so forth. Ultimately these fractions come from meiosis. However, there's not really a direct equivalent of meiosis in cultural evolution - which makes it harder to apply Hamilton's rule. Humans don't share half their memes with their parents and one eighth of their memes with their cousins. However they do typically share more memes with their parents than with their cousins. If you consider the topic of relatedness between artifacts, measuring relatedness often becomes easier - because it is easier to measure memes in artifacts than it is in brains.

It has long been understood by anthropologists that "cultural kinship" exists in humans. Humans treat all kinds of people who are not blood relatives as though they are honorary family members. Churches in particular are full of father, mother, brother and sister relationships which do not reflect any form of blood-based kinship. However, most anthropologists have historically had a weak understanding of evolution - and have reacted with hostility to the efforts of biologists to enter their territory.Many anthropologists seem to associate evolutionary theory with racism and eugenics. Cultural kinship has been regarded within anthropology as evidence that Darwinian evolutionary theory applies only weakly to human behaviour - and that cultural forces are more important. This wilful ignorance of evolution meant that they failed to find a coherent theoretical foundation that would account for their observations.

Cultural kin selection casts new light on this topic. On the one hand it shows that the anthropologists were correct to emphasize the significance of cultural kinship. However, on the other hand, it also shows that the evolutionists were right on target with their Darwinism. Cultural kin selection neatly explains the importance of cultural kinship in humans from within an evolutionary framework that includes the concept of shared memes.

Lastly, cultural kinship offers an intriguing glimpse of scientific history repeating itself. In the 1960s, group selection was a popular theory - before kin selection displaced it. Now, 50 years later, cultural group selection is a popular theory. However, kin selection is much better than group selection. It puts an entirely appropriate emphasis on the significance of close kinship, it more strongly encourages quantification and is less strongly associated with junk science. Group selection has proven itself to be a confusing and misleading tool for understanding essentially the same set of phenomena that kin selection explains. Consequently, the same dynamics that we saw in the 1960s are now evident again. A similar sequence of events seems to be playing itself out with cultural group selection and cultural kin selection. This case of history repeating itself in science gives us an interesting opportunity to quantify the scientific lag that cultural evolutionary theory suffers from. By this metric, it's about 50 years behind mainstream evolutionary theory.

There's a lot more to say about this topic - far more than can possibly fit into this video. Search online for "cultural kin selection" for much more information about this subject area.

I would give "evo-devo" 1/10 for its revolutionary qualities. Complexity theory gets a 6/10 from me on this scale - with the proviso that the revolution dates back to the 1980s. I was taught it at university, and it's been orthodoxy for decades now.

The blurb for this book claims that: "Evolution is simply change over time". That is one definition - but it isn't a definition that makes it a scientific theory. The point of Darwinism was that it made predictions and was refutable. The idea that "evolution is simply change over time" makes "evolution" into an unscientific concept.

I skimmed the book. The contents are of poor quality. It offers a revisionist history of Darwinism. This is a conspiracy theorists book about evolutionary theory. That's unfortunate. I like the "evoluton revoluton" meme. I don't like seeing it being given a bad name in this way.

Oh well, at least Alan Bennet's book is better than Spetner and Shapiro's The Evolution Revolution. That one's a creationist tract!

I read an article about memetic fields today. There seems to be quite a bit of material about "memetic fields" on
the internet. The author of the article linked memetic fields to the morphic fields of Rupert
Sheldrake - saying: "Memetic fields are the mental equivalent of morphic fields". That seems
to be qute appropriate to me: both concepts are junk science.

That's not to say that memes don't sometimes have associated "fields" of
influence. For example, one might generalize the concept of a "reality distortion
field" to cover all kinds of memetic influence. The "reality distortion field"
that surrounds some cult leaders is a potentially-useful concept that could
potentially be quantified and given a scientific basis.

However, the biggest problem with memetic fields is that memetics isn't
ready for them yet. Maybe if memetics was decades-old orthodoxy, we could
consider the idea of some Sheldrake-free memetic fields with a straight face.
However that isn't the current situation - and "memetic fields" just sound like
too much of a joke at the moment. The term "field" sounds like it comes from
physics - and a "memetic field" conjours up some kind of metaphysical
emanations from memes. Just the sort of thing that Rupert Sheldrake would love.

I think we should skip the "memetic field" concept for now. It seems like just the
kind of fringe science that could potentially give memetics a bad name.

Cultural evolution has fought for acceptance for over a century - against fierce opposition from anthropologists, philosophers - and even some evolutionary biologists.

Now, as the penny shows signs of finally starting to drop, some proponents of cultural evolution seem to have got the idea that it is a good move to link the theory to another controversial theory: group selection.

I think this is likely to be a disaster for the public understanding of science. Such a link will cause confusion for lay scientists attempting to understand the theory. It is likely to result in delays is the adoption of cultural evolution. It is also likely to result in misapplications of the theory of cultural evolution.

Linking one controversial theory to another one just risks compounding confusion - and let's face it, cultural evolution is a much more important than a methodological squabble about what accounting method to use in which organisms share heritable information. Modern versions of kin selection and group selection don't even make different predictions. Scientifically speaking, the issue is a bit of a storm in a teacup.

About the only possible favourable outcome I can see is that the controversy associated with group selection might add to the eyeballs scrutinizing cultural evolution. However, group selection is a dodgy theory which adds no new predictions to our existing understanding of science - and it has a long association with junk science - due to it being systematically applied to the cases where kin selection doesn't obviously work.

Anyway, I wish that cultural evolution enthusiasts would put group selection down. They adopted it in an atmosphere of confusion - without a good understanding why group selection was in the dog house. For example, Henrich (2004) wrote in his defense of using the "group selection" terminology:

Concerns and confusions related to Wynne-Edwards (1962) work of over 40 years ago should, in my view, be relegated to history books

However - alas - it isn't as easy as that for group selection to clean up its act. Group selection was driven into the fringes of science by kin selection. It is consistently applied by advocates to cases where relatedness is low - and so the theory doesn't work. It is systematically not applied to cases where relatedness is high - and it is obvious to everyone that "kin selection" did it.

Given group selection's ongoing association with junk science it is just the sort of thing we don't want linked to cultural evolution. Cultural evolution faces strong resistance from within anthropology. One of the many complaints is that those seeking to biologize culture are using naive biological theories, and are doing it wrong - with the potentially significant costs associated with applying these theories to humans. Of course this is a pretty feeble excuse for rejecting Darwinism entirely - but looking at Wilson-style sociobiology, they were partly right - the treatment of culture by these theorists was hopeless. Looking at modern evolutionary psychology they are partly right again - the treatment of culture by these theorists is equally hopeless. Only memetics (and similar theories) take cultural variation seriously as an evolutionary phenomenon - and so has a hope of eventually being accepted by anthropologists. Tying cultural evolution to group selection just creates another opportunity for anthropologists to reject it as "bad science". It's surely a bad strategy which will only hold the field back. Forget about group selection. It's completely unnecessary - and it will just create endless confusion - as it has been doing now for decades. Surely that is the last thing we all want.

Saturday, 27 September 2014

Group selection enthusiasts have repeatedly argued that: kin selection can only explain cooperation between close relatives; that humans cooperate in groups in which the humans are not closely related. Since kin selection can't have been responsible, group selection is needed.

Kin-based mechanisms should be designed to focus benefits only on close relatives, and thus kin selection does not help us to solve the problem of cooperation among large groups of unrelated individuals unless our kin-psychology is making a lot of big mistakes by confusing large numbers of non-relatives and strangers with close relatives.

Cultural kin selection is based on shared memes - not shared genes. Cooperation between strangers in military, religious and organizational settings is not a mistake from the point of view of the memes involved. They are recognizing their kin and directing resources towards their kin accordingly.

From the point of view of the genes of the human host the resource allocation does look like more of a mistake. Or rather: it benefits some humans at the expense of others. The genes in the factory bosses no doubt benefit if their workers behave like sisters in an ant nest - and cooperate for the common good. However the genes in the factory workers are probably not doing so well. The workers probably wouldn't wear the blue suits unless they were made to do so - and might treat their co-workers worse as a result. In short they are victims of manipulation who put up with the situation because they are wage slaves who can't find better jobs.

In other cases, the uniform wearers seem to don their robes enthusiastically. Sometimes, religions folk and tribe members seem to love the garb that makes them all appear as though they are brothers and sisters. It seems pretty speculative to argue that their DNA benefits from this - but you can imagine cases where the interests of the memes involved and the interests of the host DNA are more closely aligned. In such cases, cultural kin selection can be invoked to explain the cooperation that results - without the situation necessarily being a "big mistake" from the perspective of the host DNA.

In the paper, Joe continues:

This version of the “big mistake hypothesis” (Boyd and Richerson, 2002a) suggests that, because our psychology supposedly evolved in small groups with high degrees of interrelatedness, kin selection (along with reciprocity, see next section) favored a psychology in humans that is designed to generously bestow benefits on members of their groups. According to this idea, natural selection apparently neglected to provide humans with the ability to distinguish kin and long-term reciprocators from anonymous strangers in ephemeral interactions. Thus, in the novel world of large-scale, complex societies, this once adaptive psychological propensity misfires, giving us large-scale cooperation (Tooby and Cosmides, 1989).

That hypothesis might explain why we don't have better defenses against kinship-related manipulation. However it simply isn't the main kinship-based explanation of why humans are so cooperative! Humans mostly cooperate with other humans which they share memes with because they are manipulated into doing so - via cultural kin selection. The manipulation is typically mediated by memes, but it often serves the interests of the genes of other humans. For example, the politicians and generals spread the patriotism memes - but it's the infantrymen that are killed by them. It isn't a "big mistake" for the memes involved - or for the humans that benefit from the manipulation.

Joe criticizes this so-called "big mistake hypothesis", apparently writes off kin selection and then goes on to advocate group selection for much of the rest of the paper. To his credit, Joe does actually acknowledge the equivalence of kin selection and group selection in this paper (section 4.3). However, his treatment of kin selection seems shoddy to me.

If you want to reject decades of work on kin selection, and advocate an alternative approach, IMO,
you should first understand how to apply the standard approach and then go on to explain why your approach is better. In the case of cultural evolution, this involves kin selection applied to cultural variation. IMO, Joe Henrich fails at this project on the first hurdle, by apparently not understanding how to apply the main rival theory: kin selection. This seems like a weak position to launch an alternative approach from.

The modern wave of group selection in the social sciences is built on shoddy foundations like these. Those involved didn't properly understand how to apply kin selection to memes. They thought that kin selection didn't work - for all the wrong reasons. We can now see that they were mistaken. I think that the next issue is how best to clean up the mess they have created.

Friday, 26 September 2014

Many students of cultural evolution seem to have an idea about the thing that makes cultural evolution different. In today's paper from 2009 - by Strimling, Enquist and Eriksson - it is the ability of culture to be rejected and reacquired that makes cultural evolution different. In their words:

Although genetic information is acquired only once, cultural information can be both abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. Therefore, cultural evolution will be determined not only by cultural traits' ability to spread but also by how good they are at sticking with an individual; however, the evolutionary consequences of this aspect of culture have not previously been explored.

The problem here is that this is totally mistaken. Genetic information - information in DNA - can also be abandoned and reacquired during an individual's lifetime. It is common for individuals to be infected with DNA-based pathogens on multiple occasions. Immunity doesn't always last - and often vaccinations need to be regularly repeated. Many parasites can attack the same host many times throughout that host's lifespan. Cold and flu viruses are familiar examples. For pathogens, success often depends on how good they are at sticking with their hosts. This is true for DNA-based pathogens - as well as cultural ones.

My estimate is that: 9 times out of 10 when academics play the game of picking the thing that makes cultural evolution different, they come up with answers that are just wrong. The differences between cultural and DNA-based evolution remain widely exaggerated. That is not to say that cultural evolution and organic evolution are exactly the same - just that wide-reuse of principles from the organic realm is possible. Often differences between the realms turn out to be quantitative - rather than qualitative.

Failure to appreciate the similarities between the realms leads to a failure to reuse existing work - and to pointlessly reinventing the wheel. A failure to appreciate the similarities between cultural and organic evolution is one of the most persistent problems for the field. Most scientists don't understand the similarities at all. Only a small percentage have got as far as understanding that both realms obey Darwinian rules.

You might think that this would lead to academics flaunting their understanding of the similarities - to demonstrate that they understand the topic. However, more often than not the temptation associated with detecting some difference - and then developing a theory about it - seems to be too powerful.

Thursday, 18 September 2014

Wednesday, 17 September 2014

A recent popular history of evolutionary psychology purports to explain "how evolutionary psychology went viral". The gist of the article is that E.P. hitchhiked to success on the back of sex-related memes and controversial content. This is essentially the same marketing strategy that The Naked Ape used - back in its day.

I've previously speculated that evolutionary psychology's biggest drawback - the failure of most of its practitioners to get to grips with culture and cultural evolution - has also contributed to its popularity. Ignoring human differences and concentrating on human commonalities has made evolutionary psychology less offensive and more politically correct. This is in stark contrast to memetics - which is all about the differences between humans.

Can memeticists learn anything from the evolutionary psychology marketing strategy? Memetics, like evolutionary psychology, studies human behaviour - a topic which most people are interested in. Where evolutionary psychology has historically studied human commonalities, memetics studies human differences. It is an essential sidekick for evolutionary psychology. Memetics has historically been controversial. It hasn't been linked to sexual content very much so far - though Susan Blackmore managed to write several chapters about that topic in The Meme Machine. The volume of sexual content on the internet suggests that there is plenty of content there to be studied. However, memetics has its own associated popular content (which evolutionary psychology lacked) - namely: internet memes. Hitchhiking on this content is the most obvious route to popularity for memetics, IMO.

Monday, 15 September 2014

An NSF-sponsored paper is currently doing the rounds, claiming the evolutionary biology can help to "save the world". The associated NSF press materials are even titled: "How evolutionary principles could help save our world".

The full paper is accessible here. It's contents are reasonable: it points out how important evolutionary theory is in the modern world. However, one of the interesting things about the paper to me is that it only discusses blinkered Darwinism. Universal Darwinism - to my mind the best and truest version of Darwinian evolution - doesn't get referenced. There's no mention of the idea that culture also evolves.

If the authors understood that Darwinism applied to technology, science, economics, medicine, politics, law - and many other areas - the article would surely have had to put an even greater value on the topic.

I don't know how much longer we'll be seeing these blinkered Darwinism papers. The scientific community evidently has a lot of inertia. From my side of the paradigm shift, blinkered Darwinism looks pretty stupid. Presumably eventually it will become a matter of scientific embarrassment that well-educated humans were so slow to understand the full scope of Darwin's discovery.

Sunday, 14 September 2014

It is well known that stress states such as fear, panic, and hysteria are socially communicable.

However, it is turning out that other mental illnesses have a component of social contagion implicated in their genesis as well. For example, the following articles deal with the contagiousness of depression and loneliness.

Emotional contagion may be a widespread phenomenon. Of course, social contagion alone doesn't prove that memes are implicated. Manipulation by transmissible DNA-based pathogens is also a possibility. However memes are surely the number one suspects in such cases.

A significant study that illustrates social contagion of emotions was recently conducted by Facebook. Such social networking studies have the potential to distinguish meme-based contagion from gene-based contagion - because they can filter out short-distance relationships, leaving long-distance ones - where only meme-based social contagion is likely.

Emotional contagion seems important to understand - because of the extent of its social significance. For example, many organizations would probably prefer to manipulate their workers into states conducive to a positive working environment - and not have them too depressed or stressed.

There's no paywall. There's also an accompanying slideshow.
Most articles speculating about the future of human evolution are written without an understanding of the theory of cultural evolution - however this is not one of those articles.

The article paints a picture of longer-lived humans and
more effort expended by them on meme propagation
than gene propagation. These seem like extrapolations
of current trends.

However, the paper's forecasts extend out to 2050 - a
significant distance out - and in a zone where is
challenging to make reliable forecasts.

My own perspective is that we will probably see a large
explosion of artificial life significantly before then -
which will have a big impact on the terrestrial ecosystem.
Eventually this will turn the human world into a sideshow -
the coming memetic takeover
which I frequently speak of.

This is likely to be the real story of the next forty years. Life
extension and reduced fertility of humans seems like a rather irrelevant
by comparison - these things will have negligible socio-economic impact.

Indeed, they are less certain outcomes - since the transition to
a machine-based civilization might be a disruptive one. When
most humans become redundant and unemployable, it isn't immediately
obvious what will happen to them. No doubt here will be nature
reserves - but a nature reserve that accommodates ten billion humans
seems as though it might face significant budget scrutiny.

The article (irritatingly) contrasts biological and cultural evolution -
as though culture is somehow non-biological - which is a newbie mistake.
Even a full-blown memetic takeover
wouldn't be "the End of Biological Reproduction". Cultural reproduction is a form of biological reproduction
because culture is part of biology.

Wednesday, 10 September 2014

Hi. I'm Tim Tyler - and this is a video about memetic hitchhiking and memetic linkage.

Genetic hitchhiking involves genes changing in frequency due to their proximity to other genes. Hitchhiking can involve either positive or negative selection - in other words, increases or decreases in gene frequencies. Genetic hitchhiking is based on genetic linkage - which is the tendency of nearby genes to be inherited together.

In cultural evolution, there are corresponding effects:

Memetic hitchhiking involves memes changing in frequency due to their proximity to other memes. It is based on memetic linkage - which is the tendency of nearby memes to be inherited together.

It's a commonplace observation that the proximity of two memes is correlated with the probability of them being inherited together. This is true across a large variety of meme types. Words are more likely to be copied together the closer they are together. Image components and video fragments behave in the same way. Generally, the closer two memes are, the greater their memetic linkage. The way in which linkage changes with distance can often be fairly easily quantified.

Memetic hitchhiking is an extremely important concept in marketing. Memetic hitchhiking is used by marketers because they frequently face the problem of how to memetically engineer content so that it spreads to a large number of users. Hitchhiking on an existing meme is a common solution to this problem. People attach product messages as payloads to viral videos, celebrities, beauty, news stories, humour - anything that people spread around. When the viral content is spread around the payload is delivered to an increasingly large audience at a low cost to the marketing department.

For marketers their payload acts as a parasite on the original content. As such there's a constant risk that the viral content will find a way to separate itself from the payload. Marketers have a range of techniques to avoid this happening. They can interleave the payload with the content. They can make the payload small, short or inconspicuous. They can transmit the payload subliminally. They can launch legal attacks on payload-free content.

Well-known popular experts at memetic hitchhiking include Weird Al Yankovic, The Gregory Brothers, and Ray William Johnson.

Memetic linkage is generally defined in terms of a distance metric. That metric need not necessarily be spatial distance - for example in the case of podcasts or videos, time is often the most appropriate metric to measure. Genetic linkage is always based on a spatial distance metric. However, it seems inappropriate to restrict memetic linkage to spatial distance metrics.

Genetic linkage causes functionally dependent genes to migrate towards each other. Each gene benefits from the proximity - due to the increased linkage reducing the chances of the genes being separated from one another. The result is that genes form functionally-linked complexes. In memetics, the same effect is seen: functionally dependent memes tend to migrate towards each other - which increases their memetic linkage and reduces the chances of the memes being separated from one another. The result is that functionally-linked memes form memeplexes.

Not all hitchhiking of memes on memes qualifies as being "memetic hitchhiking". In the organic realm, a snail can hitchhike a ride on a duck's foot. However, you wouldn't normally call that "genetic hitchhiking" - even though in a sense,snail genes are "hitchhiking" on duck genes. The term "phenotypic hitchhiking" seems more appropriate there. Similarly you wouldn't normally refer to a bumper sticker on a car as a case of "memetic hitchhiking". The germ line of the memes responsible for the car are in the car manufacturers headquarters, and the germ line of the memes responsible for the bumper sticker are in the sticker-making factory - which might be nowhere near each other. Again, the term "phenotypic hitchhiking" seems more appropriate in this case.

Sunday, 7 September 2014

We need to descend to the level of the gene, rather than the individual, in order to see that the gene exists surrounded by copies of identical genes that exist in all its relatives [...] Seeing this swarm of genes that exists around a particular one, we can then ask what is the behavior caused by this gene that is most likely to cause the propagation of this set of copies in the relatives around it.

This "descending to the level of the gene" is known as "the gene's eye view".

Just as kin selection led to and helped to promote the gene's eye view - so cultural kin selection will help promote the meme's eye view.

The meme's eye view has always been part of memetics, but is has been largely ignored by social scientists. Many of them are absurdly confused about the 'meme' concept - complaining that it atomizes cultural wholes into isolated pieces, or that replicators are only one part of evolution - or a string of other equally silly objections.

In 1985, Boyd and Richerson explicitly focused on the human hosts involved, saying:

This does not mean that cultures have mysterious lives of their own that cause them to evolve independently of the individuals of which they are composed. As in the case of genetic evolution, individuals are the primary locus of the evolutionary forces that cause cultural evolution and in modelling cultural evolution we will focus on observable events in the lives of individuals.

This rather myopic perspective has lasted for thirty years - with most analysis of cultural epidemiology focusing on the human hosts - and not on the memes themselves.

As Steven Shennan put it in 2013:

The variation, selection and retention processes that underlie cultural evolution were laid out in detail more than 25 years ago (Cavalli-Sforza and Feldman 1981, Boyd and Richerson, 1985) and have been extensively elaborated on since (e.g. papers in Boyd and Richerson, 2005). However, this has mostly been done from an agent-centred perspective and not from that of the cultural lineages themselves - the "memes eye view" - and the two are not the same.

It seems reasonable to expect that the rise of cultural kin selection will significantly promote the "memes eye view". From the perspective of memeticists this will be a long overdue development - since it is what they have been saying all along.

Memetics has been ahead of its time for far too long. Looking at the scale of cultural evolution's scientific lag in academia, it seems reasonable to expect that cultural kin selection will start becoming more prominent in academia around about now. It seems practically inevitable that this will drag the "meme's eye view" (and thus a big chunk of memetics) into academia as well. It will be about time.

As part of the deep relationship between organic and cultural evolution, the history of the cultural versions of these fields seems likely to mirror what happened in the organic domain - though it is widely observed that cultural evolution and memetics suffer from a large scientific lag.

In the organic realm, group selection was popular until the 1960s - when it was practically wiped out by kin selection. At the moment, cultural group selection is a popular form of explanation. My expectation is that it will be largely wiped out by cultural kin selection.

The advantage of using kin selection is partly down to a difference in emphasis. The term "kin selection" emphasizes close relatedness - which is an important factor in why the theory works. The term "group selection" makes no mention of family or relatedness. This seems to cause group selection enthusiasts to neglect the significance of relatedness - and then go off the rails.

Group selection is probably more popular initially because it is easier to understand and apply. Without quantifying relatedness, armchair theorists are free to speculate about traits being adaptive at various different levels. However, for group selection, this ease of application also contains the seeds of its downfall. Scientists love to measure things, and kin selection's famous r, b and c encourages quantification. This leads to more rigorous science. It also gives kin selection a higher status among scientists.

In the organic realm, kin selection won out in the 1960s and 1970s. However in the social sciences, many researchers in the domain of cultural evolution - Richerson, Boyd, Bowles, Gintis, Sober and Henrich and Turchin - have adopted the term "group selection" - despite the fact that the term is historically mired in confusion and misunderstandings and has led to a substantial body of junk science. Practically the whole of the rest of the evolutionary biology establishment prefers the kin selection framework instead. Kin selection pushed group selection into the scientific fringes.

I think the most obvious hypothesis to explain the situation is that the social scientists are lagging behind the times. Cultural evolution's scientific lag explains the observed phenomena neatly. The social scientists are about forty years behind the times. The idea of cultural evolution having a scientific lag predicts that the current enthusiasm for cultural group selection will be largely replaced by a substantial blossoming of cultural kin selection.

The coming displacement also makes sense after looking at the way in which the theories have been applied to date. The group selection theorists have only scratched the surface of the topic - concentrating on large-scale conflict between human groups. However cultural kin selection has a vastly broader domain of applicability than this. The group selection theorists fail to concentrate on close relationships. Yet this is precisely where theory predicts that the largest effects will be found. The enormous significance of close cultural kin has been largely ignored. There's a wealth of material relating to cultural resource allocation and cultural parental care, which kin selection illuminates better than group selection does. The approach based on group selection approach has been tried by social scientists - and the results are in. The approach has been a miserable failure. Cultural kin selection will be vastly superior by a wide range of metrics.

Wednesday, 3 September 2014

Genes can promote their interests by causing their owner to help relatives - which is the familiar kind of kin selection - or by causing their owner to hinder non-relatives - which is generally known as spite.

Initially, it was thought that paying a cost to hinder non-relatives was rare. Several reasons were given. Harming others often has significant associated costs - they can bite back. Relatives are often neighbours - making them easier to identify and more likely to be interacted with. Also it was thought that a very large number of non-relatives would need to be harmed (especially in large populations). Overall it seemed as though spite didn't add up.

While plenty of individuals do deliberately harm other individuals, they often benefit in some way. This theory of "selfish competition" explains phenomena such as male combat, sibling rivalry and competition between saplings to replace their parent in the canopy. This theory seemed to make a lot more sense than Hamiltonian spite.

However, Hamiltonian spite did bounce back to some extent. Though initially the search for Hamiltonian spite focused on small populations, it was realized that the size of the population of local competitors was what really mattered. Population viscosity would often mean that this was just a handful of individuals. Gardner and West cover this revolution in their paper Spite and the scale of competition. They say:

When competition is global and fitness is proportional to absolute success, spite cannot be favoured, but as competition becomes increasingly local fitness is increasingly determined by success relative to social partners, so that spite can be a winning strategy.

With this background, we can now turn to cultural spite. As in the organic realm, cultural spite is predicted by theory,
but seems relatively elusive in practice.

Patriotism memes. These really do manipulate their hosts into fitness-reducing acts while benefitting near-identical copies of themselves in other individuals - comrades, generals, and propagandists. These appear to be a genuine case of cultural kin selection. Interestingly, patriotism memes sometimes seem to be implicated in acts that directly harm other individuals. In particular they are implicated in conflict and warfare. Could this be a real-world case of cultural spite?

Maybe - but there's some room for doubt. In many cases, warfare generates kill-or-be-killed situations. When the benefit is survival, "selfish competition" is a more obvious explanation for the resulting conflict. The situation in warfare is complicated, and the link to spite is rather speculative and indirect. Patriotism memes are an interesting candidate case of Hamiltonian spite in culture - but it doesn't seem like an open and shut case.

Negative advertising in politics. American politics regularly features negative advertising. As well as hearing the good things candidates will do, citizens hear all about the bad things associated with competing candidates. When they outsource jobs, when they raise their own salaries, when they act like puppets of other politicians - and so on. An explanation in terms of spite is straightforwards: this is a case where the effective population size is small (and so spite can work). Also, destroying things is easier than creating them. The winners do contain DNA genes, but politics is also a battle between rival memeplexes. The main problem with this example is that it can be argued that the behaviour is merely selfish - since the advertising sponsor (or their affiliates) gain many of the votes lost by the target.

Another promising area to look for spite is corporate history. There may well be cases where companies have a limited number of competitors - and there will have been scope for acts where a company hurts itself, but hurts its biggest competitor more. However, this is research that remains to be done. The problem here is that individual acts that look spiteful would not be too impressive. What we would really like to find is spiteful adaptations. Corporate history may be less promising in this regard.

These are the strongest case for real-world cultural spite that I am aware of. However, they are not very convincing. If more convincing examples of cultural spite come along, I'll update this page.

Memes. In this area I think there was a "move towards the middle ground" over the course of the week. Here is my attempt to make the middle ground explicit, combining elements from Dennett, Blackmore, and Sperber and linking them to the ideas above: meme-talk is appropriate as a way of discussing recurring cultural objects that are produced and used in a somewhat low-comprehension way. They need not be replicators, even in a relaxed sense. They might arise by hetero-impact. But there is (or should be) a real difference between a meme-based view of cultural variants and a traditional rational choice framework. It is not the case that memes are just whatever recurs in culture; Sperber pointed out that this would trivialize the meme framework, and I think that is right. But memes need not be copied. There might be a role for attractors, hetero-impact, and so on. So the viability of this relaxed view of memes is tied to the empirical disagreement described above about comprehension.

I guess I think that the future of meme-talk will be in informal summaries of low-comprehension processes of cultural change, rather than actual theory-building.

I'm quoting this because I think it is wrong. I think it is also pretty silly. There's no theory of memes as "low-comprehension" entities. Intelligently designed memes qualify too. One would not avoid calling a "gene" a "gene" because it was the product of genetic engineering. Memetically engineered memes are memes too. Peter's proposal makes no sense at all.

Of course it is also not the case that "memes are just whatever recurs in culture". Just as there are genes (copied) and gene products (not copied), so culture is composed of memes (copied) and meme products (not copied).

for most of memes’ relatively brief life there has been no germ-line phenotype distinction and so no meme vehicles or interactors. However, as one might expect, they have recently appeared and are spreading fast. Printing presses, car factories and computer software all copy the instructions for making more books, cars and digital products rather than copying the products directly.

I'm drawing attention to this because I think it is wrong.

I think that the best way to divide phenotype from genotype in biology is using information theory - as follows: genotypes are inherited from, phenotypes are genotype products that are not inherited.

If you adopt this perspective, there are very few "naked memes". Most memes have associated phenotypes that are not copied. For example, many memes have emotional salience - creating pleasure, fear - or some other emotion. These are meme products and are not themselves copied from / inherited.

I think that the idea that "naked memes" were important historically has to be based on some other conception of what "genotype" and "phenotype" refer to - and I think that all the proposed alternative conceptions are inferior. Sue appears to be using her "copy the instructions" / "copy the product" distinction - but this is a bit vague: what exactly are "instructions" and "product"? The information theory conception of the "genotype" / "phenotype" split is very crisp. In its terms, "instructions" refers to heritable information and "product" refers to the things it influences - but then there are hardly any 'naked memes'.

The popular hijacking of Dawkins’ term “meme” for any cultural item that “goes viral” on the Internet, regardless of whether it was intelligently designed or evolved by imitation and natural selection, has been seen by some to subvert the theoretical utility of the term altogether. There is also the unreasoned antipathy the term evokes in many quarters (reminiscent of the antipathy towards the term “sociobiology” that led to its abandonment). Alternatively, if one is “Darwinian about Darwinism” we should expect the existence of cultural items that are merely “memish” to one degree or another, and we might as well go on using the term “meme” to refer to any relatively well-individuated culturally transmitted item that can serve as a building block or trackable element of culture however it arrives on the scene. Other terms, such as Boyd and Richerson’s “cultural variant”, have been proposed, but the term “meme” has become so familiar in popular culture that whatever alternative is used will be immediately compared to, identified with, assimilated to meme(a Sperberian attractor, apparently), so perhaps the least arduous course is to adopt the term, leaving open its theoretical definition, in much the way the term “gene” has lost its strict definition as protein-recipe in many quarters. Since the long-term fate of such an item will be settled by differential reproduction (or something similar to differential reproduction) however much insight or “improvisational intelligence” went into its birth, it has a kind of Darwinian fitness.

This seems like a rather weak defense to me - it leaves open the reply that: all kinds of nonsense is sometimes popular - but that doesn't make it scientific.

The sheer popuarity of term "meme" is obviously a big factor in its rise - but the failure of its opponents to come up with a coherent technical critique is surely another significant factor. If there were genuine scientific reasons for not adopting the term "meme" that would be one thing - but the attacks of critics on the meme terminology miss the mark so widely, that it is hard to take them seriously. I for one would not endorse the adoption of the term on grounds of popularity if such a course of action was not scientifically correct.

Of course, there are also many positive reasons for adopting the term - but these may overlap with the reasons for its popularity.

The commentary contains relatively little enlightened discussion of memes - except for by Susan Blackmore. However,
Peter Richerson has some good things to say on the topic. In particular, he says:

I don’t have a big problem with the concept of memes so long as the meme-gene analogy is not excessively rigid. Susan assures is that Rob’s, Joe’s and my old fears in this regard are unfounded.

That sounds good! This, however, does not sound so good:

I have qualms about the concept of universal Darwinism. Culture/memes are a lot like genes in some respects and not like them in others. I see a shallow analogy where others seem to see a fundamental law-like similarity.

I am definitely in the "law-like similarity" camp. Darwinism: it's not just a good idea - it's the law.

Monday, 1 September 2014

Academia has mostly shunned memetics so far. Instead of memetics, one corner of academia has embraced the closely-related theories of Boyd and Richerson.

Of all the theories of cultural evolution that sprung up in the 1980s and 1990s, Boyd and Richerson's ideas were probably the second closest to memetics. It would have been a bit better if William Durham's work "Coevolution: Genes, Culture, and Human Diversity" had been more influential. Among its other virtues, this book actually endorsed and used the meme terminology. However, Boyd and Richerson kept plugging away at the topic over a long period of time producing more papers than any of the other teams involved.

While it's good to see at least some understanding of cultural evolution in academia, Boyd and Richerson's cultural evolution seems to be a poor substitute for memetics. To me it seems like a feeble and watered down version of the real thing. The revolutionary zeal of memetics is replaced by a "softly-softly" approach. The neat and simple terminology of memetics is discarded and replaced by wordy and ugly terminology - much of which seem destined to never catch on. The deep relationship between cultural and organic evolution are replaced by a bunch of muddled ideas about how different these processes are. Memetics is more symbiosis aware. It is just better - in most of the ways that matter.

Memetics should be the name for cultural equivalent of genetics. We additionally need
a cultural
equivalent of ontogeny. The proposal that we need a cultural equivalent of evolutionary
theory seems much more dubious: Darwinian evolutionary theory applies to both the organic and
the cultural realms. We should probably focus on
generalizing Darwinism -
rather than working on a culture-specific version of it.

One of the problems with Boyd and Richerson's influence on the field has been their
hostility to memetics. Their critical articles have included:

These articles show that Richerson and Boyd never developed a sympathetic understanding of memetics, and have instead concentrated on attacking misconceptions associated with it. Of course, criticisms are welcome, but they are most helpful if they are based on sympathetic understanding. In this case, I'm not really seeing it.

This is rather disappointing. Historically speaking, evolutionary theory pre-dated genetics by about 60 years. Now we are seeing a similar scientific lag with cultural evolution and memetics. You would think that academics would be able to learn from history - but in this case, apparently, the lesson is going to take a while to sink in.